The current issue of Eszmélet is likely of interest to all of our readers, because it focuses on the fate of workers in East Europe, especially in Hungary, the former Soviet Union and Poland. Many contributions are made to understand the problem why after the working class after the system change was unable to resist the social degradation by capitalist expropriation. The ‘social integration' of the working class was determined by state suppression for decades, almost making impossible to acquire working class consciousness, because this consciousness remained the monopoly of the ‘socialist' state/party. Two articles conduct lessons from the demolition of ‘welfare achievements' – the background of the fate of the working class after the system change – and the ineffectiveness of capitalist use of human, material and natural resources, the parasite character of this system. Within this framework the problem of Roma people gained a particular role, of which ‘anthropological' aspects also addressed.

Table of contents

1. Lewis H. Siegelbaum : The late romance of the Soviet worker in Western historiography
2. Mark Pittaway : Retreat from collective protest: Household, gender, work and popular opposition in Stalinist Hungary
3. Tóth Eszter Zsófia : Commuters in Hungarian documentaries – Black train, Gyuri Cséplő, The protégé
4. Vera Trappmann, Rafal Towalski : Polish workers: how to live when everybody wants to forget about you
5. Eszmélet : A new quarterly: Fordulat
6. Tamás Gáspár Miklós : The ghost of the welfare state
7. Binder Mátyás : Roma nation building – from historical and cultural antrophological approach
8. Artner Annamária : The dotted ball and the ineffectiveness of capitalism
9. Balázs Gábor : A French passion: Trotskyism (part 2)
10. Ana Bazac : Sartre and the adventures of the concept of shortfalls
11. Tütő László : A tale about aunt Mary and the spectacle